Romanticism was not so much a style or manner as a multifaceted
movement that
represented changing ideas and a new artistic sensibility. Various
themes characterized
this sensibility, from patriotism and nostalgia to the probing of
the depths of the soul.
Individualism and the cult of the self combined to create a mood
that found
its expression in a number of different artistic outlets.

Higurative art played a vital role in the European movement known
as Romanticism, which began in music, literature, and the theatre,
and only later embraced painting and sculpture. It emerged in the
late 18th century and continued to evolve throughout the 19th
century. The term encompassed various concepts, such as man versus
nature, the complexity of the psyche, religion, politics, and
history. Unlike the preceding artistic movement, Neoclassicism,
which was expressed through an easily recognized style and precise
forms, Romanticism had less clearly defined outlines. It was an
indication of mood as well as taste, a collective expression of the
prevailing European spirit - often accompanied by a degree of
extreme emotion.

A Romantic Neoclassicism?

As Neoclassicism turned to antiquity for its ideal models, so
Romanticism yearned for an alternative to everyday reality, aspiring
to the truth of the soul and the freedom of irrational impulses. The
similarities between these two stylistic trends became more obvious
during the decades leading into the 19th century, at which point
they more or less coincided - for example, in the work of Ingres.
Neoclassicism and Romanticism are two sides of the same coin - both
movements reacted to the extravagance of the Rococo style by
returning to human values, but whereas Neoclassicism was driven
purely by reason, Romanticism was motivated and led by emotion.
Antonio Canova's statue in marble of
Cupid and Psyche (1787-93),
although quintessentially Neoclassical in style and structure,
marked the boundary between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. This work
unconsciously reflects the Romantic concept of humankind's perpetual
longing for the unattainable, in that the embrace of the two figures
demonstrates the beauty of an unfulfilled union. The longing for a
distant and seemingly more appealing age (albeit that of the ancient
world) is a fundamentally Romantic notion. Thus, a powerful and
emotional undercurrent finds its way into the paintings of David,
particularly in his depictions of individual pathos, more usually in
female subjects. These are typically bestowed with an aura of
dignify and nobility, or a collective sense of despair and passion.
In contrast to the serene
classicism advocated by Winckelmann, there are blood-curdling
scenes, such as Lica being hurled away with brute force by Hercules
in Canova's sculpture (1795-1802); similar subjects are also present
in the work of Flaxman.Anti-naturalism and the more explicit themes of the early Romantic
movement emerged against the historical background of the
restoration of the monarchy in France. One artist who stands out
during this period is Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (1767-1824). Of his
best-known works, Endymion Sleeping (1793), has a dreamlike quality:
Shadows
of French Heroes who Died for their Countiy Gathered in Heaven by
Ossian (1800-02) is a veritable phantasmagoria; Mile Lange as Danae
(1799) shocked its audience with its forthright eroticism; while
both La Pieta (1787) and The Funeral of Atala (1808) displayed
unconventional religious feeling. The language of natural forces,
both within and
around humankind, had by now established itself, and would go on to
find its most exuberant expression in the Romanticism of
HenryFuseli, William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich,
Theodore Gericault,
Ingres, and Goya. If it is true that "from the sleep of reason
monsters are begotten" (Goya), it is also true that a rationalist
Utopia has, at its innermost core, a mysterious and superhuman
background inhabited by obscure feelings, arcane voices, and echoes
from a fantastical world. Typical examples of these elements are the
angelic figures portrayed by the German artist Philipp Otto Runge
(1777-1810), the rampant exoticism presented in the work of
Delacroix, and the troubled skies painted by
Constable and Turner.

INGRES: STRADDLING TWO STYLES

The works of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) represent the
apotheosis of the Neoclassical style, while equally hinting at
future developments in art. His canvases - particularly his early
works - portray all the elements of formal splendour, sober
elegance, and an adherence to models of the past (above all the
works of Raphael, who he studied in Italy). In his later paintings,
a subtle sensibility, a widespread sensuous-ness, and an
extraordinary psychological insight were expressed, forming a
transitional link between 18th-century art and the French painting
of the Second Empire. In his teacher David's work, it was the moral
and political subject matter that achieved supremacy, while in that
of his own it was the purity of form, developed through the
sometimes artificial exquisiteness of proportions. These were
calculated to emphasize the eroticism and delicate sensuality of his
nudes and to give the illusion of a perfect balance. However, Ingres
was harshly criticized for this by David: "weak feet, hands...arms
and legs a third too short or too long." In an official work such asNapoleon I Crowned (1806), the emphasis of the curves and diagonals
were in total opposition to Neoclassical composition. For the poet
Charles Baudelaire, the work evoked "an impression that is hard to
explain, and which, in itself, sums up in indefinable proportions
uneasiness, annoyance, anxiety." Ingres' bathers - one of his
favourite themes - odalisques, and Oriental women represented an
exercise in "academic perfection", marking the birth of a style
characterized by a languid, soft, expressive eroticism that was very
different from that of artists such as
Boucher
and
Fragonard. His
later portraits of European nobility best illustrate the great
psychological depth of his work.

James Macpherson published his bogus odes by Ossian in 1762-63,
a work full of themes that would be picked up by the Romantics.
Half a century later, Ingres used them as his inspiration for this painting.

A difficult and controversial painting, this portrait of the most famous
Parisian
composer of the day combines classical iconography with a perceptive
portrayal of the subject wearing the dress of the modern intellectual.

Ingres

Born at Montauban, France, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres first
studied in Toulouse, before enrolling at David's studio in Paris in
1797. He became the most admired and influential of the French
painters, his studio frequented by countless leading figures of
society. He was Director of the French Academy in Rome and Professor
at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, just two of many official appointments
and honours.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique IngresSelf-Portrait at age 24

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

born Aug. 29, 1780, Montauban, France
died Jan. 14, 1867, Paris

painter and icon of cultural conservatism in 19th-century France. Ingres
became the leader of the French tradition of Neoclassical painting after
the death of Jacques-Louis David. He was also one of the finest
portraitists of his century. Ingres's cool, meticulously drawn works
were the antithesis of the contemporary Romantic school. His historical
paintings display his lifelong obsession with line and contour, while
his female nudes reveal a sensuality unique to Neoclassicism.

Early life and works

Ingres received his first artistic instruction from his father,
Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres (1755–1814), an artistic jack-of-all-trades of
modest talent but considerable professional and social pretensions.
Ingres's formal education at the school of the Brothers of Christian
Doctrine was cut short by the abolition of religious orders in France in
1791, during the Revolution. So he was sent to study at the fine arts
academy in Toulouse instead. Six years later, in 1797, he set out for
Paris, where he entered the studio of the most celebrated artist in
France, the Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David. Two years later
Ingres was accepted into the École des Beaux-Arts (“School of Fine
Arts”). The culmination of his artistic education occurred in 1801, when
he was awarded the coveted Prix de Rome. Ingres's prizewinning painting,
“The Envoys of Agamemnon,” demonstrates his mastery of the standard
academic pictorial vocabulary as well as his attraction to modish
stylistic archaisms.

Because the French treasury, strained by Napoleon's wars, was unable to
pay for his scholarship in Rome, Ingres was forced to remain in Paris,
where he began to distinguish himself as a portraitist. In 1804 he
fulfilled his first official commission in this genre, “Bonaparte as
First Consul” (Museum of Fine Arts, Liège). In 1806 he attracted public
attention with a display of five portraits at the official exhibition of
contemporary art known as the Salon. Four of these paintings were
standard exercises in Davidian Neoclassicism—a trio of portraits of
members of the Rivière family (now in the Louvre Museum, Paris) and a
rather swaggering “Self-Portrait” (Condé Museum, Chantilly). Much more
original was a portrait of “Napoleon on his Imperial Throne” (1804;
Museum of the Army, Paris), an intimidating effigy of absolutism
incarnate that is executed in a willfully stiff and archaic style
reminiscent of 15th-century Flemish masters. The critics were unanimous
in their condemnation of this work and branded Ingres's self-consciously
primitivizing manner as “Gothic.” It would take the artist two decades
to shake this pejorative label.

In 1806 Ingres finally set off for Italy, where he did little to counter
his burgeoning reputation as an enfant terrible. The academicians were
disconcerted by the linear severity and the restrained colours of the
two paintings he sent back to Paris in 1808: the famous “Valpinçon
Bather” (Louvre Museum, Paris) and “Oedipus and the Sphinx” (Louvre).
The culminating production of Ingres's student years in Rome, the large
mythological painting “Jupiter and Thetis” (1811; Granet Museum,
Aix-en-Provence), proved no less provocative. In the fantastically
fluid, seemingly boneless body of the sea nymph Thetis, Ingres
prominently displayed what would become one of the most distinguishing
features of his mature art: an audacious reconfiguration of the female
anatomy.

Mature life and works.

When Ingres's tenure as a student at the French Academy inRome expired
in 1810, he opted to remain in Italy, where he had begun to establish
himself as a portraitist of Napoleonic officials and dignitaries. He
also received occasional commissions in the more prestigious genre of
history painting. In 1811 he was invited to participate in the
redecoration of the Quirinal Palace, which was in the process of being
transformed into Napoleon's official residence in Rome. Ingres's
contribution consisted of two monumental canvases: “Romulus, Conqueror
of Acron” (1812) and “The Dream of Ossian” (1813).

This period of relative prosperity ended abruptly in 1815 with the fall
of the Napoleonic empire and the evacuation of Rome by the French.
Desperate for work, Ingres resorted to executing small-scale portrait
drawings of English and other tourists. An almost uncanny control of
delicate yet firm line, and an unending inventiveness in posing his
sitters in a manner to reveal personality through shrewdly observed
characteristic gestures, combined with a capacity to record an exact
likeness, make this category of Ingres's drawings unique. Though these
pencil portrait drawings are among Ingres's most widely admired works,
he himself scorned them as mere potboilers. Despite his supreme gifts as
a portraitist, Ingres throughout his life professed to disdain
portraiture and strove instead to establish his credentials as a creator
of grand historical paintings.

But commissions for monumental works were hard to come by, so Ingres
contented himself with subject painting on a more restrained scale. It
was during this period that he emerged as a master of medieval and
Renaissance subjects executed in a purposefully primitivizing style
recalling the artistic mannerisms of the age of the scenes being
depicted. These canvases did little to shield him from the attacks of
the critics, however, who continued to portray him as a kind of savage
primitive intent on taking art back to its infancy. A hostile response
likewise greeted what would become one of the artist's most celebrated
canvases, the “Grande Odalisque” (1814; Louvre). Exhibited in the 1819
Salon, this painting elicited outrage from critics, who ridiculed its
lack of conventional modeling as well as Ingres's habitual anatomical
distortions of the female nude.

It was as a religious painter that Ingres, who moved from Rome to
Florence in 1820, finally began to turn the critical tide in his favour.
The artist adopted a more conventional classicizing style—one based
directly on the example of his hero Raphael—for “The Vow of Louis XIII”
(1824; Notre-DameCathedral, Montauban), a blatant piece of pro-Bourbon
propaganda celebrating the union of church and state. This picture was a
spectacular success at the 1824 Salon, earning the artist his first
critical accolades as well as election to the Academy of Fine Arts.
Thus, in the span of a single exhibition, Ingres went from being one of
the most vilified artists in France to one of the most celebrated.

Heartened by the success of “The Vow of Louis XIII,” Ingres, who had
accompanied the picture to Paris, resolved to remain in France. In 1825
he opened a teaching studio, which quickly became one of the largest and
most important in Paris. Two years later, at the Salon of 1827, Ingres
followed up the success of the “Vow” with his most ambitious history
painting, “The Apotheosis of Homer” (Louvre). The “Apotheosis” is a vast
historical group portrait that summarizes the development of classical
culture in the West. This work is not only a resounding manifesto of
Neoclassicism but also a memorial to the narrow-minded, prejudicial
brand of cultural conservatism with which Ingres would be linked for the
rest of his career.

Despite having achieved his first real success under the stewardship of
the Bourbon kings of France, Ingres rallied to the more liberal
Orléanist regime that arose out of the Revolution of 1830. In 1832 he
produced the “Portrait of Monsieur Bertin” (Louvre), a pictorial paean
to the utter tenacity of the newly empowered middle class. Ingres's
masterful characterization of his pugnacious sitter, along with the
portrait's mesmerizing realism, won the artist great popular success at
the 1833 Salon.

In 1829 Ingres had been named professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, and
in 1834 and 1850 he served as president of that institution. But already
by 1833 he stood accused of artistic imperialism—of attempting to impose
his personal style on the entire French school of painting. Such charges
dominated the critical discourse in 1834, when the artist exhibited the
“Martyrdom of Saint-Symphorien” (St. Lazare Cathedral, Autun). Rumoured
beforehand to be his definitive masterpiece, this monumental religious
canvas was violently attacked by critics on the political and cultural
left and was defended no less vehemently by Ingres's allies on the
right. Deeply wounded by the lack of universal approbation, the
notoriously hypersensitive Ingres announced his intention never again to
exhibit at the Salon. He also solicited and received the post of
director of the French Academy in Rome, and set off for Italy in 1834.

Ingres's tenure as director of the French Academy in Rome was dominated
by administrative and teaching duties. During his six-year stint in
Rome, he completed only three major canvases: the so-called “Virgin with
the Host” (1841), the “Odalisque with Slave” (1840; Fogg Art Museum,
Cambridge, Mass.), and “Antiochus and Stratonice” (1840). The exhibition
of the latter painting turned the critical tide in Ingres's favour once
more. Primed by this success, Ingres in 1841 made a triumphal return to
Paris, where he dined with the king and was publicly feted at a banquet
attended by more than 400 political and cultural dignitaries.

Late life and works

Ingres had finally secured his status as the greatest living artist in
France. The darling of the Orléanist elite, he continued to showcase his
works in a series of exclusive, semipublic exhibitions and also received
several prestigious decorative commissions, none of which, however, he
ever fulfilled. Terrified by the spectre of social and political chaos
during the Revolution of 1848, Ingres welcomed the declaration of the
Second Empire under Napoleon III in 1852.

It is ironic that, given his pretensions as a history painter, Ingres's
major accomplishment during his later years continued to be in the genre
of portraiture. By the mid-1850s he was the most sought-after society
portraitist in Paris. Ingres was particularly adept at capturing the
grace and splendour—as well as the ostentation and vulgarity—of the
feminine elite. Among his most beautiful portraits in this genre are the
“Comtesse d'Haussonville” (1845; Frick Collection, New York), the
“Baronne de Rothschild” (1848), the “Princesse de Broglie” (1853;
Metropolitan Museum, New York), and two portraits of the renowned beauty
Mme. Inès Moitessier that he painted in 1851 and 1856 (now in the
National Gallery, Washington, D.C., and the National Gallery, London,
respectively).

After having boycotted the Salon for more than two decades, Ingres was
coaxed into entering an official public exhibitiononce again on the
occasion of the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855. The critical
reaction to the 69 works he displayed there was predictably mixed:
conservative reviewers hailed him as a kind of artistic messiah, while
more progressive critics denounced his hackneyed style as utterly
irrelevant to the modern age. The government mollified the wounded
artist by elevating him to the rank of Grand Officer of the Legion of
Honour; he was the first literary or artistic figure to achieve this
lofty honour. In 1862 Ingres became one of the first professional
painters to be appointed to the Senate.

The most notable works Ingres painted late in his career are female
nudes. In 1856 he completed “The Source” (Orsay Museum, Paris), a
disturbingly vacuous representation of an adolescent girl that became
one of his most celebrated canvases during his lifetime. But his
culminating achievement in the genre of the female nude was the much
more complex, multi figure “Turkish Bath” (1862; Louvre).

Ingres died in 1867. He bequeathed to Montauban, his native city, the
contents of his studio. In addition to about 4,000 drawings (the
studies, sketches, and working drawings of a lifetime), the bequest
included several of his own paintings, the paintings in his private
collection, and his reference library. All of this is now housed in the
Ingres Museum at Montauban.

Assessment

For most of the first half of the 19th century, Ingres was a champion of
line and of firm contour, of subtly graded, clear colour, and of
carefully balanced composition. He viewed with contempt the dramatic
chiaroscuro, the turbulent movement, and the tense emotional context of
his chief rival, the Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix. Ingres's death
marked the symbolic end of the tradition of monumental history painting
in French art. By this time contemporary life, rather than the exploits
of the ancient Greeks and Romans, had already begun emerging as the
dominant subject matter of modern painting. The finality of Ingres's
passing was rendered all the more evident by his lack of talented
pupils; despite having been surrounded by a group of fanatical devotees,
the artist left no one behind to carry the torch. Time has dimmed the
acrimony of the quarrels of Ingres's epoch and made clearer the quality
of his genuine, if rather self-contradictory, genius. His position as
one of the truly great painters of the 19th century is now secure, and
his considerable influence upon Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Pablo Picasso, and other modernists is now generally acknowledged.

Andrew Carrington Shelton

JEAN-AUGUSTE-DOMINIQUE INGRES:

"OEDIPUS AND THE SPHINX"

1808; 188.x 149 cm (73x58 in): Musee du Louvre, Paris.

Jean-Auguste Dominique IngresOedipus and the Sphinx

Ingres increased the original measurements of this picture before
exhibiting it at the Paris Salon, probably in 1825. The subject is
the meeting between Oedipus and the sphinx in a desolate place at
the gates of Thebes. The painting shows a rocky cave in which the
nude figure of the prince confronts the mythical monster. Over his
right shoulder, the hero wears a red mantle, which falls against his
left thigh. His left foot is placed on a large rock, and two spears
lean against his right shoulder, their points resting on the rock.
To the left, the sphinx sits in the shadows on a pile of rocks.
wrhile below, in the foreground, a foot and some bones are depicted.
These are remains of the sphinx's victims -wayfarers she has eaten
for failing to find an answer to her riddles. On the lower right of
the composition, an animated male figure gestures in the distance.

The figure of Oedipus dominates the composition - it was even
more prominent in the original smaller picture, the dimensions of
which are outlined in white. The figure occupies a large part of the
space and is the focus of lighting. In the larger painting, the dark
space around the luminous body has increased, and the artist has
arranged four points of light to provide counterpoint to the shape
of the nude figure. These are: top left, the breast of the sphinx;
top right, the Leonardo-style eye of light among the rocks; below
right, the suffused gleam on the line of the horizon; and below
left, the foot of a victim. The polygon obtained by joining the
points of light contains the human elements of the scene. The
composition can be seen to be based on two opposing curves, as
indicated by the red lines. The principal figures are contained in a
sort of almond shape that inclines towards the top left-hand corner.

Taking inspiration from the classical world and Neo-Platonic
thought, Ingres has structured the hit man figure using geometric
forms of precise symbolic significance. The picture contains a
square, a triangle, and a circle. The square represents terrestrial
solidity, stability, and balance and is placed in the space created
between the bent and straight legs of Oedipus. The triangle, also a
stable form, but dynamic and linked to the world of the emotions, is
positioned between the arm and the torso, seats of the heart and the
liter. The circle, enclosing the head, is the shape of harmony,
without beginning or end.

The light that illuminates Oedipus and the rocks in the
foreground comes from an undefined source but falls upon the stone
and the golden skin of the figure. The nude figure stands out against
the dark background, its outline drawn with sharp precision. This is
very evident in the right leg. where the full light on the calf
fades by fine gradations into the shadow of the foot and upper
thigh. In the luminous masses on the left-hand side of the painting,
the draughtsmanship is also very strong. The breast of the sphinx,
defined by the light and the chiaroscuro, has a sumptuous maternal
nudity that alludes to the later tragedy that was to befall Oedipus.
(After he had solved the sphinx's riddle, the monster killed
herself. Oedipus's fate was to marry his own mother who. when she
discovered the truth, hanged herself.)

Jean-Auguste Dominique IngresOedipus and the Sphinx (detail)

The stable posture of Oedipus contrasts with the motion of the
small figure on the right: the red and orange-red mantles unite
the two figures, warming their flesh tones. In both cases, the
material is creased or fluttering in the breeze in contrast with the
smooth and solid mass of the naked flesh. This detail shows Oedipus
meeting the eye of the sphinx, with his forefinger curved towards
her breast. The clarity of the scene leaves no room for mystery or
ambiguity.

Jean-Auguste Dominique IngresOedipus and the Sphinx (detail)

The sole of a human foot is illuminated against the darkness
in the bottom left of the painting, while a pile of bones and a
skull are outlined against the rocks in the foreground. Tide superb
contours and lucidity of form outline a tragic still life. With the
sphinx positioned above, space for the dead is contained in the
left-hand side of the composition. Space for the living, in the form
of the gesturing figure in the distance, is on the right. Oedipus is
positioned firmly in the centre, his fate undecided.

__________________
__________________

Continuity and Renewal

During the Neoclassical phase, which partly overlapped with early
Romanticism, there were hints of the styles and ideas that would
follow. Neoclassical artists had already sought to distance
themselves from the gaudiness and fussy over-decoration of the
preceding Rococo style. They tackled moral problems, the clash of
ideals, and the concept of a harmony that is both external and
spiritual (as expounded by the art historian Johann Winckelmann, who
was one of the key theorists of Neoclassicism). However, the
Romantics went further than the Neoclassical artists would ever have
contemplated, even though both were searching for the same truths
about the human soul. They attempted to explore a deeper, darker
level of the human spirit, moving definitively away from the
shallowness of the Rococo movement. At the same time, the Romantics
recovered some of the more troubled and dramatic themes examined
during the Baroque period. During the 19th century there was a
distinct change in attitude towards the aesthetic and ethical model
of the ancient Greeks, which, since the Renaissance had by and large
provided the basis for artistic endeavour. For Goethe, this change
in attitude became a seminal period of insight in the development of
man and his acquisition of spiritual maturity. Later, the writings
of Nietzsche would address the disturbing, irrational aspects that
lay hidden beneath the polished, sophisticated image of Greek
civilization. The notion of antiquity as the essence of natural
harmony was challenged by Edmund Burke in his Inquiry into the
Origin of our Idea on the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), which argued
against the finite concept of beauty and the classical conception of
nature as harmony. Antiquity was interpreted in an non-classical way
by the Danish artist Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard (1743-1809) and,
later, by the Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), as well as
by other visionary painters. The occult, the significance of dreams,
notions of infinity, a yearning for distant and exotic lands,
anxiety, and the predominance of emotions were among the wide
variety of themes that concerned the Romantics.

Danish painter, designer and architect. His paintings reveal
both Neo-classical and Romantic interests and include history paintings
as well as literary and mythological works. The variety of his
subject-matter reflects his wide learning, a feature further evidenced
by the broad range of his creative output. In addition to painting, he
produced decorative work, sculpture and furniture designs, as well as
being engaged as an architect. Successfully combining both intellectual
and imaginative powers, he came to be fully appreciated only in the
1980s.